RESEARCH AND DISCOVERY

Adding texture to Islamic texts

Database will catalogue and contextualize Islamic works of science

Robert Wisnovsky and F. Jamil Ragep are building a unified database of Islamic teachings.

By Daniel Spitzberg | A new database that will
serve the scholarly community in Islamic studies has received $363,127 in
funding from the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI), with matching
funds from the Quebec Ministère de l'Éducation, du Loisir et du Sport, and
additional funds from McGill's Faculty of Arts. Dr F. Jamil Ragep, Canada
Research Chair in the History of Science in Islamic Societies, will lead the
project with a total of $950,000.

For Dr Ragep, the need to catalogue and contextualize key Islamic texts is
large and growing larger. "People have a lot to say about Islam, science, and
philosophy, but it's based on a very, very small sampling of texts," he said.
"We want the history and knowledge of the premodern period and traditions in
Islam to be based on real, concrete information."

The hefty project title-"Scientific Traditions in Islamic Societies:
Secularism and Rational Knowledge Structures as Integral to Premodern Islam"
(STIS, for short)-reflects the ambition of the endeavor. The process of
taking text embedded in mostly unread manuscripts from archives around the
world and producing digital, readable, and searchable content is long and
arduous. Questions such as ‘What is the role of Islam in terms of the
development of science and philosophy?’ are monstrously complex, argues
Ragep. “They must be broken down into components, and our database will
enable you to do so.”

In the first project phase, images of over 5,000 of the 25,000 existing
Islamic scientific manuscripts will be collected. The focus will begin with
astronomy and expand to include fields such as mathematics, music theory, and
optics.

Though ‘the words on each page' make up the core data, Ragep explained that
the project's utility relies on an appreciation of more than text, author,
title, and publication date.

"To get a sense of its place in Islamic society, our approach to the Islamic
tradition includes where it began, where it went, and how it developed over
time," says Ragep. To this end, the STIS database will weave together facts
on who has studied which texts, where they were disseminated, and other
sociological information-and every detail will be searchable.

The grant for STIS comes hot on the heels of another multi-funder grant to Dr
Robert Wisnovsky, director of the Institute of Islamic Studies and research
collaborator on STIS. Less than a year ago, Wisnovsky received $1,500,000
from CFI, the Quebec Ministère de l'Éducation, du Loisir et du Sport, and the
Faculty of Arts to launch "The post-classical Islamic Philosophy Database
Initiative" (PIPDI), a project that included Dr Ragep among its collaborators
since its inception. The goal is to have a unified database with STIS because
the cross-over benefits would be vast.

Questions such as ‘What is the role of Islam in terms of the development of
science and philosophy?' are monstrously complex, argued Ragep. "They must be
broken down into components, and our database will enable you to do so."

This allows for subtle sub-questions. "If astronomy texts were studied in
religious schools, what does that mean? If a religious text contains
discussions of Aristotle or Plato, what does that tell us?" ask Ragep. "These
are questions that people living a generation ago would have been reluctant
to address, but answers are possible with our methodology and the information
we will collect."

For both Ragep and Wisnovsky, their commitment to the STIS and PIPDI projects
are a mix of personal and professional.

"I had learned all the clichés about Islamic intellectual history in some
very good schools in North America, and when I started doing research, the
things I studied didn't jive very well," recounts Ragep. "I started in very
technical matters of mathematics in Islam, but it became very difficult to
explain things in the standard approach. I had to devise different ways of
looking at these questions."

"My original ambition was to ensure that great Muslim thinkers are included
in the heroic narrative of Western thought," says Wisnovsky. "I began to
realize that Islamic philosophy, so voluminous and complex, was a vast
cultural creation, not just a small number of geniuses or texts."